[1195] in peace2
Esperanto course in January
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob B Schwartz)
Mon Nov 5 22:39:09 2001
Message-Id: <200111060338.WAA12533@all-night-tool.mit.edu>
From: "Jacob B Schwartz" <quark@alum.mit.edu>
To: peace-list@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 22:38:54 -0500
The MIT Esperanto Society will be offering an
immersive course over IAP. More information is
available in the online IAP guide at:
http://websis.mit.edu/iap/nsesperanto.html
I think people on this list would find Esperanto
interesting. First, it's a way to communicate
directly with people around the world, perhaps to
hear first hand opinions from people in
politically interesting countries (I've made
friends with people in Colombia, for instance, and
had discussions on the situation there, even
though I don't know Spanish).
But beyond that, it seems like many
Esperanto-speakers are activists. There an
international labor organization that uses
Esperanto as its working language. The founder of
the Green party in Ireland speaks Esperanto and I
understand that Esperanto is highly linked with
the Green party there. At an international
Esperanto gathering in Strasbourg this summer, I
met some kids who were (for lack of a better word)
"hippies" and just travelling around Europe. One
had been to the anti-globalization protests in
Prague, and one night we sat around a fire out in
a clearing and he and a French guy sang us protest
songs -- in English, French, and Esperanto --
which he had learned or written or translated at
the various protests that he'd been to in Europe.
And I was visiting a friend of mine from Berlin
(who happened to be reading a biography of
Jawaharlal Nehru at the time) and she was telling
me that it seemed like half the members of her
Esperanto club in Berlin were anarchists. And an
Esperanto-speaking friend of mine in Springfield,
MA, (who's also into anti-WTO/IMF, fighting
sweatshops, green parties, etc) started a small
effort to translate some pages from the RAWA
website into Esperanto. There's also a really
cool international effort called Indigenous
Dialogues (http://www.idnetwork.nl), which tries
to facilitate direct and sustainable communication
between indigenous peoples (without, say, having
to go through the costly power structures of
larger governments). Not to mention all the
historical ways that Esperanto empowered people to
reach outside their national borders, particularly
in countries where physical travel wasn't
permitted.
Anyway, if you're interested, please check out the
IAP offerings. There's also some information on
the Esperanto Society's web page:
http://web.mit.edu/esperanto/www
And feel free to email me if you want to hear or
see more about Esperanto.
